USA Today devoted the front cover to the Business Networks and Programming. Maybe one of the waiters will ask her why she is picking on Dell. She could be reporting real news stories with confirmed facts. That would be something! Leigh
Maria Bartiromo, anchor of CNBC's Street Signs but best-known for her live reports from the bustling floor of the stock exchange, says she hears it all the time. "I go to weddings and waiters come up to me and ask, 'What about those employment numbers?'"
usatoday.com
TV news becoming all about business
By David Lieberman, USA TODAY
NEW YORK - The trend had been building for months, but this week clinched it. Business news is now a staple of mainstream television.
Traditional newscasts that once dismissed business news as too geeky and non-visual for TV ran breathless reports about America Online's agreement to buy Time Warner, devoting precious airtime to a pair of CEOs who joke that they've each had a "charisma bypass."
But that was overtaken by Thursday when, in a dizzying business-news cycle, President Clinton trekked to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to talk to financial news channel CNBC; Bill Gates unexpectedly gave up his CEO crown at Microsoft; and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan delivered a speech signaling new moves on interest rates.
To be sure, this was an unusual week. But it illustrates the extent to which the public's appetite for reports on the markets, the economy, corporate intrigue, and personal finance has spread from Wall Street to Main Street.
Maria Bartiromo, anchor of CNBC's Street Signs but best-known for her live reports from the bustling floor of the stock exchange, says she hears it all the time. "I go to weddings and waiters come up to me and ask, 'What about those employment numbers?'"
As stock prices soar and people gaze in awe at the pace of change in technology and new media, "it seems like there's an explosion in financial news," says Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "The genre of financial journalism isn't just a beat. It's a whole industry of its own."
Lichter's group found that the number of business stories even on mainstream ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts rose 19% last year, to 1,175 from 989 in 1998.
"What has so captivated us is the Internet revolution," says Willow Bay, co-anchor of CNN's Moneyline. "It's transforming our everyday life. And investors don't want to miss out."
Some of the growing attention to business and finance is at the expense of stories on the general economy, including fiscal policy, labor, consumer news and poverty.
"The rule of thumb 10 years ago was that for every minute about the wealthy you get a minute for the poor," says Andrew Tyndall, whose newsletter, The Tyndall Report, looks at how the major TV newscasts allocate their time. "Now the ratio is about 8-to-1. It's astonishing."
It's also surprising, because newscasters have long assumed that viewers flee when the subject turns to business.
No more. In the last three months of 1999, for the first time ever, financial news cable channel CNBC attracted more viewers than general news champ CNN did on weekdays between 5:00 AM and 7:30 PM.
The trend hasn't been lost on CNN. Last fall it boosted weekday business news programs to 5« hours a day from 2«.
But some news executives wonder how long it will last. Does the growing attention to business news represent a fundamental shift in viewers' interests? Or is it a fad that will fade once Wall Street's go-go years have gone?
"If the stock market didn't go up, then what's the story? Why would you care?" says Michael Bloomberg, who founded the Bloomberg financial news empire. "The conventional wisdom is that the potential audience for business news is every man, woman and child -- and that's unfortunately not realistic."
'A permanent sea change'
Yet CBS MarketWatch CEO Larry Kramer says viewers feel increasingly connected to Wall Street - not just because it's booming - and are enthralled by the unpredictable daily flow.
"There's a permanent sea change here," he says. "Financial news is becoming an interesting story to the mass market for the traditional reasons: fear and greed. People say, 'I've got to make all of these choices, and I don't want to be an idiot.'"
Lots of companies have big stakes in this debate. Business reports are commonplace across the cable dial on CNBC, CNNfn, Bloomberg Television, Fox News Channel and USA Network.
On the broadcast side, CBS bought a controlling stake in MarketWatch.com and uses its correspondents to provide reports for network newscasts - including daily spots on its new morning program The Early Show and soon local reports for network-owned stations.
PBS also devotes lots of time to business, from its venerable Nightly Business Report and Wall $treet Week to pledge drive specials featuring financial adviser Suze Orman.
To keep things in perspective, business news is still primarily for niche audiences. On Monday, when CNBC's Business Center attracted its biggest audience ever, it still just amounted to 570,000 homes -- which is terrific for cable, but pales next to the audiences that the national broadcast networks attract. This is true even allowing for CNBC's claim that its actual audience is at least 40% bigger because Nielsen doesn't include viewers watching from their office TVs.
Still, business news is in vogue across the board on newscasts at a time when there's little news competition. There's no major war, crisis or national cause galvanizing citizens. Unlike last year, there's no White House sex scandal. And this year's presidential election hasn't yet generated widespread excitement.
"Politics, which used to be the other big source of news, is less interesting now," says Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio and Television News Directors Association. "If you're in a time of peace and prosperity, people aren't looking to government to solve their problems."
Business news is relatively inexpensive to produce. Most newscasts fill their airtime with talking heads in a studio. At the same time, advertisers pay top dollar to reach the well-to-do fans of financial news.
CNBC reaches cable's wealthiest audience: Its viewers average nearly $56,000 in yearly household income. It's little surprise, then, that the channel has one of the biggest profit margins in TV even though it ranks No. 27 for cable viewers.
Making the picture may look even brighter for financial news outlets, is that more Americans have their futures tied to Wall Street. Incomes are growing and families increasingly pick the retirement investments in their 401(k) plans.
Stocks account for about 42% of the average family's financial assets, up from 29% in 1989. And more than 40% of all families own stock, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds and retirement plans - up from about 32% a decade ago.
"So many more people are looking at 401(k)s and IRAs, and that growth is continuing," says CNN Business News President Shelby Coffey.
These trends, plus the growth of online trading, has led to "a democratization of (financial) information," CNBC President Bill Bolster says. "I'm no longer being sold a stock by a broker. I buy a stock from a broker. That's a distinct difference."
Business news covered like sports
Though viewers have a financial incentive to stay abreast of business news, it's also becoming more fun.
"CNBC covers it like sports with their on-air personalities," notes CBS MarketWatch's Kramer. "People ask, 'What does the Big Kahuna think?'" (That's analyst Joe Kernen on CNBC's early morning Squawk Box.)
The sports analogy is apt. Viewers watching live reports from the exchange floors - a fairly recent innovation - often see more jostling and body checks than in a hockey game.
Bartiromo says she frequently must elbow her way into crowds of traders to learn the opening prices of stocks in the news. She keeps the adrenaline pumping in her pre-market reports by trying to broadcast those crucial bits of trading information before the traders can report them back to the brokerage houses.
"When I first started broadcasting from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange it was new for traders to see a reporter, and a woman," she says.
That has helped to make business news less intimidating for ordinary viewers. "It gives the impression that this isn't over my head -- so maybe they can understand it too," Bartiromo says.
Viewers are seeing flash as well as cash.
"Business leaders are as well known as many movie stars, musicians and TV stars and that's a change in the last decade," says long-time CNN financial chief Lou Dobbs, who now runs Space.com. "Jack Welch, Ted Turner and Donald Trump are as well known to the public as the singers of 98 Degrees."
Bloomberg, though, wonders whether the business news bubble is about to burst now that investors seem to be losing their passion for new Internet stocks.
"If there's less of a story there, then there's less interest (overall)," he says.
Nor is he impressed with the growing number of on-line traders. "A handful of people do it," Bloomberg says. "And my advice is to get a life and play with their kids.". |
